smile not the stars (star trek | alynna nechayev)

[fiachairecht]

smile not the stars. star trek: the next generation, alynna nechayev. learning english, pretending the federation still allows identities beyond 'human'. 654w, rated t.

It takes Alynna Nechayev 244 days from the start of her time at Starfleet Academy to lose her accent in English. She counted. Did you really think she wouldn't? It's amazing what a motivation the laughter of your peers combined with your own protectiveness can be.

She misses the lilt in her English speech, misses the way the Serbian sounds used to blend with the Standard English and remind her of home. There is one other Serb at the Academy, and his English is perfect from day one. Alynna is jealous. Alynna hates him for his betrayal. She wonders, if she fucked him, would he call out in Serbian or English? She never gets the chance to find out, and is glad.

She overcompensates in Serbian instead, exaggerating the accent until her aunts scold her for it, chide her for unspooling hundreds of years of memories in overlong vowels and smashing the years back together in angry consonant clusters. So she stops, goes back to the rhythms she learned in childhood, but she's confident by then that she won't forget. (This is her first victory.)

But she doesn’t speak, really properly speak Serbian again until after her first captaincy (her second victory) and her first officer catches her singing a folk song in her quarters one night. She's embarrassed, at first, she's supposed to set an example for her crew and that means universal translators on at all times, but it had been so long since she’d heard her own voice in her own language, and they had been in deep space for so long—

—and it isn't until she stops stammering apologies and listens to the woman (Gráinne Ní Chonratha, Commander, Earth-Republic of Ireland, 35 years old) reply, in accented English, that she is not a native speaker either. Her translator is off as well. That night, they speak in their own, self-taught English, and when Alynna's accent starts to creep back in, she ignores it.

So they go on together, the gaeilgeoir and the Serb, teaching each other their native language and reinforcing their own (and each others') identities one word at a time. They push together against the Federation's enforced sameness, against a government that doesn't trust them enough to be loyal unless they reduce themselves to nothing but human, plain simple cookie cutter human. By the time Alynna is promoted to the admiralty and Gráinne gets her own ship, they are communicating with each other in an easy mix of Gaeilge and Serbian that makes everyone else on the ship ask why bother? (This is her third victory.)

*

(And then comes the Dominion, and comes the Borg, and comes the true danger of the hive. And just when Alynna thinks she can claim vindication, just when she thinks she has something she can point to to say see, I was right all along, I should never have been forced to choose the Federation's rhetoric shifts. Now that the enemy has been defeated, they say, it is the Federation's duty to pick up the pieces and put them back together and bring all the other worlds into the Federation's embrace so that nothing like that ever happens again. Alynna laughs and laughs, pulls off her rank insignia and grips is until it leaves grooves in the skin of her hand. She, it seems, is alone in her desire for a little bit of self-reflection. They have won the war, and she is not going to deny that her tactics played a large part in that, but this is not a victory for her.)

*

After-after the war, though, when she and Gráinne are both fleet admirals smiling at each other across the pillows strewn haphazardly around the bed they occasionally share, planning to turn Starfleet inside out, they both know that their choices were all worth it, in the end. (This is her last victory, even though it doesn't feel like one.)